Today's The Maestro's birthday, Duke Ellington's music all day on WKCR.
"And you are all invited to join the finger-snapping. I don't have to tell you that one never snaps one's fingers on the beat. It's considered aggressive. Don't push it; just let it fall. And if you would like to be conservatively hip, then at the same time tilt the left earlobe. Establish a state of nonchalance. And if you would like to be respectably cool, then tilt the left earlobe on the beat and snap the finger on the afterbeat. And so by routining one's finger-snapping and choreographing one's earlobe-tilting, one discovers that one can become as cool as one wishes to be."

The Los Angeles Times asked me to attend a dress rehearsal for the LA Opera's production of "The Birds," a fable written by Walter Braunfels in Munich in 1920. I hung around backstage and in the empty Dorothy Chandler Pavillion and watched as all the parts to the opera came together: no sign of Bugs Bunny.

WKCR is giving us twenty-four hours of Billie Holiday to commemorate her birthday today, April 7th. Phil Schaap will tell some stories, Lester Young will play some beautiful obligatos and you’ll feel better about being alive.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/wkcr/